Bad to the Bone

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  She brightens. “We’ll be undercover, like another con job.”

  The door to the studio opens, and Noah glides in. “Good morning,” he says as he retrieves a bottle of water from the fridge. “What’s new?”

  We bring him up to speed on the situation. He listens with concern, then turns to me.

  “How will you infiltrate these people without a bite?”

  “I’ve been bitten.”

  “Four months ago,” Lori points out. “How are you going to convince them you have a habit you can’t kick?”

  “Clever makeup application?” I look at each of them for encouragement. “Removable vampire bite tattoo?”

  Noah screws the cap back on his water bottle. “I’ll do it right now.”

  I take a step back. “Uh, do what?”

  “Do you mind?” he asks Shane, who shakes his head.

  “Not if I’m here.” Shane looks at me. “You’ll barely feel it. Noah’s like the master phlebotomist of vampires.”

  A cold heat sweeps over my scalp. “I don’t want to be bitten.”

  “We did it before,” Shane says.

  “And it hurt!” My breath shortens just thinking about it. “I said, never again.”

  Lori crosses her arms. “I can’t get into the Bitten meeting without you. You’re the one who knows Ned.”

  I dig my nails into my palms. I don’t want to do this, but Lori’s right—I’m the only avenue to the Fortress.

  “Fine. But not in the neck. And it has to be Shane.” I turn to him and touch my waist, right below my rib cage. “Here, like you did to Deirdre.” My voice gives out at the mention of the woman I once watched him drink. They were so helpless in each other’s arms.

  Shane nods. “It won’t be deep, just enough to make it convincing.”

  “And no drinking.”

  “Promise.” He points to the door. “Everyone else out.”

  David stops next to me on his way to the stairs. “Thanks. I know this isn’t easy for you.”

  I glance at Shane, conferring with Noah in the corner of the lounge. “It’s for a good cause, right?”

  David pats my shoulder as he passes. It’s a casual, friendly gesture, like the kind we used to share before the weirdness began.

  Lori follows David upstairs, and Noah exits into the hallway by the studio. Then it’s just me and my biter.

  Shane kisses me lightly on the lips. “They should give you a bonus in your paycheck.”

  “Just get it over with.” My muscles feel like they could snap from the tension. “Forget the hypno - eyes and the pretty words of comfort.”

  “Okay, but it’s easier if you relax.” He brushes my hair behind my neck on one side. “Hey, are those new earrings?”

  “No, I’ve had them for years.” I finger one of the small fake garnet studs. “Do you like them?”

  “I always like red.” He massages my shoulder with one hand and slips the other under the hem of my shirt, shifting it up on one side. “But you usually go for something a little funkier.”

  “Well, now that it’s cold, I’m wearing my hair down, and I don’t want to get it caught in—”

  A third hand rests on my hip, and a sudden warm pressure touches my waist.

  “What the—Ow!” Something just pricked me, like a bee sting. I look down to see Noah withdrawing his fangs from my flesh. “Hey!” I try to move away, but Shane holds me fast. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Nothing now.” Noah stands and dabs his mouth with a tissue while his other hand holds a piece of gauze to my side. “All finished. Here, apply pressure.”

  “That’s not—how did you—” I slap my hand over the gauze, where a small bloodstain is spreading, then look up at Shane. “You set me up.”

  “Sorry, but I thought this was better than hurting you.” He nods at Noah over my shoulder. “Thanks. Nice stealth.”

  “How could I be so stupid?” I smack Shane in the chest with my free hand. “You never talk about jewelry.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “I should want to kill you.” I shake my head in amazement at the wound. “But you were right. It hardly hurt at all.” I look at Noah. “How do you do that?”

  He shrugs. “It is a gift.” Noah touches the edge of his red- gold - and - green knit cap and saunters toward the hallway. “Good night, lady and gentleman.”

  When the door shuts behind him, I turn back to Shane, who’s staring at the wound on my waist. The blood flow hasn’t slowed at all.

  “Why does it take so long to stop?” I ask him.

  “We have anticoagulants in our saliva.” He blinks, but doesn’t look away. “Like mosquitoes.”

  “Ha.” I attempt a joke to lighten the growing tension. “They should make anti - artery-clogging drugs from you guys.”

  “Hmmm.” He rubs his hands along the sides of his jeans, still staring.

  “I’ll need another pad,” I tell him. “Hello?”

  Shane jerks his gaze back to my face. “Sorry? I mean, yeah, okay. Gauze.” He turns away, then scans the room, as if he’s already forgotten what he’s seeking. Then he lurches to the credenza and opens the second drawer.

  “You want to drink me, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.” He rummages through the drawer. “But I don’t want that between us. I don’t want to start craving you in even more ways.” He turns to me with a packet of gauze and a bottle of iodine. “I remember how good you taste.”

  I stretch out my hand so he won’t have to come too close. “I probably taste like salsa after that breakfast burrito.”

  He tries to smile but doesn’t give me the first aid stuff. “Lie down, it’ll stop bleeding faster.”

  I recline on the couch on my unwounded side. Shane sits at my feet and peels the wrapper off the gauze, his hands trembling. Then he replaces the blood - soaked square of soft cotton with a clean one. “Hold it there.”

  I eye the bottle of iodine. “That’ll hurt worse than the bite.”

  “Better to be safe, since we didn’t clean your skin before Noah bit you.”

  After the ouch is over, Shane tugs my legs to rest in his lap. He slips my shoes off and starts to rub my feet. It soothes us both.

  He squeezes my knee and speaks in a lighter tone. “So is this Ned guy cute?”

  I shrug. “He’s bald.”

  “Oh, okay.” He goes back to rubbing my feet, secure in his status.

  Guys with good hair are like thin girls—they think their opposites are automatically no competition. But give me a bald guy with a good body over a lumpy guy with good hair. I guess that makes me shallow in a different way.

  I turn my head so I can see Shane’s expression when he answers the question I’m about to ask. “You gave up biting women for me because it’s such an intimate act. So why did you let Noah bite me?”

  Shane smiles, his eyes soft. “Tasting your blood won’t make him lust after you. The older we get, the more we can separate our nourishment from its source.” He shrugs. “By the time I’m his age, I’ll probably be able to see a human being as nothing more than a walking vein.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not you,” he hurries to add. “Plenty of older vampires have human friends.”

  My mouth goes dry. “Just friends?”

  He sighs and rubs the pale brown stubble on his jaw. “This is coming out wrong. When I say ‘friends,’ I mean any relationship. Vampires can still see people as more than livestock. Look at Monroe and David, for example. Mutual respect, common bonds, all that.”

  My heart feels like it could fit inside an espresso cup. When I’m forty - four, will I want more than mutual respect and common bonds with Shane? Will I even know him?

  “Do older vampires fall in love with humans?”

  “Or stay in love with them?” His face is shadowed by the halogen lamplight reflected off the ceiling. “Is that what you’re asking?”

  I nod, unable to speak.

  Shane takes my hand. “
Honestly, I’ve never heard of one. We get less human as we age, so it’s harder for us to relate to you. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.” His thumb caresses mine. “You keep me young and human.”

  “I try.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “But you said you didn’t want that. You said you’d rather fade than become someone you’re not.”

  “True, but there’s gotta be a middle ground between basket case and publicity puppet. I think you can help me find it.” He kisses my hand softly. “Besides, I can’t imagine ever not being in love with you.”

  I return his smile, because I can’t help it, then put my head down and try to enjoy the foot rub while ignoring the fading sting in my side.

  People speak of “emotional roller coasters” as if they’re a bad thing, but those people are on the part of the roller coaster that makes you throw up, not the part that makes your blood sing and your heart leap into your throat, the part that makes you smile so hard your cheeks hurt.

  And that part is why, when we stumble off, most of us run to the back of the line to ride again.

  13

  Lunatic Fringe

  “It makes me feel close to him.” Lori twists her hands together and glances at the rest of the therapy circle. “I’m giving him something he needs. It feels like we belong to each other.”

  The group leader, Dr. Shelby, looks up from her notepad and regards Lori over her half - moon glasses. “Are you his sole donor?”

  “I’m not a donor,” Lori says with an edge to her voice.

  “If he drinks your blood, that makes you his donor.” Dr. Shelby taps her pen against the ends of her long silver braid. “Are you the only one he drinks from?”

  Lori looks away from the therapist, at the third - grade classroom’s display of shoebox dioramas. “You know the answer to that.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  Lori’s jaw tenses. “Of course he has other donors. He’s young, so he needs to drink a lot more than I can give him. But I’m okay with that, because I know I’m special. He doesn’t take those other people to dinner. He doesn’t talk on the phone to them for hours.”

  “Does he have sexual intercourse with them?”

  “I—” Lori flushes. “I don’t know. We’re not exclusive or anything.”

  I squirm in my seat, partly because the plastic chair is killing my ass, but mostly because Lori’s pain is making me want to smack Travis seven ways to Tuesday.

  We decided it would be easier for her to just tell the truth, with some exaggeration, so she wouldn’t have to remember a fake story. She’s the kind who wears her feelings all over her face.

  Dr. Shelby removes her glasses and gives Lori a sympathetic look. “Do you want to have an exclusive relationship with this man? Do you want to be his girlfriend?”

  “It’s too soon to think of that.” Lori crosses her arms and sits back in her seat. “We just started going out a few weeks ago.”

  “And look what it’s done to you,” says a strong, clear male voice.

  I turn to see a young guy sitting next to Ned, a guy with shaggy dark curls and gleaming blue eyes. I remember him checking Lori out before the meeting.

  He clears his throat. “Sorry, my name’s Kevin.” He looks at Dr. Shelby. “Can I try to help?”

  I surreptitiously mark off his name from the list of Ned’s cell phone contacts. With the doctor and other members who have already spoken, that accounts for six out of twelve names so far. Four others share Ned’s last name and live in Chicago—family members, I presume. The remaining two are unlisted, and designated merely as Stevenson and B.

  Dr. Shelby nods, and Kevin turns back to Lori.

  “We don’t have to be emotional slaves. I know he makes you feel awesome, and it seems like you’d be lost without him.” He taps his fingertips against his chest. “I’ve been there.”

  I look at Lori, who watches him with wide round eyes as his speech continues. My phone vibrates in my pocket, signaling a new text message. I slip it out, shielding it in my palm, and angle my head to read Travis’s message:

  Stevenson = FAN VP

  My eyebrows pop up. Ned knows the vice president of the Family Action Network? Jackpot!

  Dr. Shelby utters a soft “Ahem.” I look up to find her glaring at me. I put my phone back in my pocket and focus on Kevin, who’s finally wrapping things up.

  “But we deserve better,” he says. “We deserve to be treated with respect. We’re human, after all.” He says this last part with a curled lip, the way a whiny bigot might say, “We’re white, after all.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I ask him.

  His eyes narrow as they turn my way. “These monsters treat us like livestock. But they’re the ones who should be rounded up.”

  “And then what?”

  Dr. Shelby breaks in. “That’s getting off topic. Lori, do you think Kevin’s right? Do you think each of us has the power to reach for happiness, even if it means letting go of what we tell ourselves we need?”

  Lori’s brow furrows, and she glances at me. “I guess.” She rubs her left shoulder. “But that wasn’t all he was saying. Kevin thinks humans are better than vampires.”

  “We are.” He looks at her with such intensity, I want to shield her. But she’s not cowed.

  “They were once human,” she says. “Some of them you can’t even tell the difference.”

  “They drink blood.” He holds up his hands in a pleading gesture. “People don’t do that.”

  “Everyone does something no one else does. My family’s Finnish. We eat blood dumplings and reindeer. That doesn’t make us better or worse than other families.”

  “Being a vampire is not like being from Finland.” He raises and lowers his palms like he’s weighing two objects. “They’re metaphysically different creatures.”

  Dr. Shelby interrupts again. “We’re not here for a philosophical discussion. We’re here to help each other overcome emotional blocks that keep us from leading vampire - free lives.”

  I try not to laugh at the psychobabble. I’m not entirely successful.

  The “doctor” turns to me. “What about you, Ciara? Are you ready to tell your story?”

  I begin with the truth, to make my job easier. Besides, every lie has a truth at its creamy - nougat center.

  “I discovered my boyfriend was a vampire the hard way. He bit me when we were, uh, intimate. Without my permission.”

  One of the men hisses. I hide my annoyance and continue.

  “That got us off to a rocky start, but we worked things out, and I told him I never wanted to be bitten. Ever.”

  They all cock their heads, as if I’ve just started reciting Homer in the original Greek. They’ve never noticed that vampire bites hurt?

  “Then one night, he got me really drunk.” Yeah, like that would happen. “We were fooling around, you know, naked.” I make brief eye contact with the three men in the group. “Next thing I know, he’s biting me. I tried to push him off, but he wouldn’t stop.” I put my hands on my stomach, feeling sick for telling such a horrible lie about an imaginary Shane. “And then, all of a sudden, it started to feel good.” I move my palms to my thighs in an “unconscious” gesture and slide them up and down. “Real good.”

  Possessing their rapt attention, I pause.

  “Then what?” Ned says, jaw slightly agape.

  “I liked it. But the next time, I was sober, and it hurt, so I made him stop.”

  “Did he stop?” Dr. Shelby asks in a clinical tone.

  “He got me a glass of tequila. A big glass.” I sigh. “So now blood and booze are all tangled up in my mind.”

  “Yes,” she says. “You associate being bitten with a pleasurable chemical state of awareness.” She chews on the end of her glasses, and I wonder if it tastes like scalp. “Do you consider yourself addicted to this man?”

  I almost laugh, because I don’t do addictions. I quit smoking because it bored me.

  But then I wonder
: could I live without Shane? The thought makes me feel heavy and cold.

  “I need him.” I stare at the floor. “I love him. But that’s not the same as addiction.”

  The others—except for Lori—make disapproving noises, clicking their tongues and murmuring words like “slave” and “denial.”

  Dr. Shelby breaks in. “Ciara, our group was formed on the addiction model. Our very premise says that the notion of an equal relationship between a vampire and a human is absurd. If one being feeds off another, there can be no freedom, no true respect.”

  I look at Lori’s stricken face. “But what if it’s voluntary?”

  Dr. Shelby shakes her head. “You know the power that lies in their eyes.” She gives me a sympathetic gaze. “With vampires, there are no volunteers.”

  “So how’d you like your first meeting?” Kevin asks us across the diner’s shiny white laminate table. He directs his second sentence to Lori, who’s sitting next to me. “Hope we didn’t scare you off.”

  She huddles inside her brown wool coat, like she always does after coming in from the cold, and says nothing.

  I jump in, tapping the edge of the dessert menu on the table to grab their attention. “It’s great to meet others who understand what we’re going through. We can’t exactly write to Ann Landers about this.”

  Across from me, Ned gives a warm smile, and I can’t help thinking he’d be a nice friend if he weren’t bat - shit crazy.

  “When I met Dr. Shelby,” he says, “it was like God threw me a lifeline. Like He was saying, ‘Ned, I want you to live. You have a purpose.’ “

  “Wow.” Elbows on the table, I rest my chin on the heels of my hands so I can give him an admiring gaze. “So what’s that purpose?”

  “To be a shepherd.” He spreads his fingers on the table surface. “See, each of us has a choice. We can turn inward and drown in our own bitterness, or we can open our eyes and see others’ suffering. At first, that just makes it hurt more, because it reminds us of the damage these creatures can wreak. But once we bring others into the fold, once we show them the way to freedom and the true path to God, we free ourselves all over again.”

  I want to look away, or better yet, run away. His words remind me too much of the lies my parents used to tell their congregations, the parade of suckers who’d give money in exchange for a promise of salvation. Mom and Dad would speak and sing of freedom and hope, and those people’s eyes would shine just like Ned’s.